Alan
A. Aja

"Alan A. Aja is associate professor and acting chair in the Department of
Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College (CUNY). He has
published in a range of scholarly and public outlets with focus on
inter-group wealth disparities, socioeconomic stratification, and public
policy. His recent publications include the book Miami's Forgotten Cubans:
Race, Racialization and the Local Afro-Cuban Experience
(Palgrave-McMillan, 2016) and co-authored pieces in the Boston Review, the
Nation, Dissent, the American Prospect, Latino Rebels and other outlets.
Before academia, Aja was as a labor organizer in Texas, conducted
environmental research in Cuba, worked as a human rights organizer in
Argentina and in a refugee hostel in London. Currently, he is assisting on
a documentary/news piece by filmmaker Rudy Valdez on the effects of
mandatory minimum sentencing policies on families. He has provided live
and/or taped commentary for various media outlets, including CNN en
Español, MSNBC™s the Grio, TV3 (Cataluyna, Spain), CUNY Television,
Brooklyn News 12 and (the former) Air America. Aja™s parents were born in
Cuba. He considers Miami, Florida and Louisville, Kentucky as his
co-hometowns. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his family, all Brooklyn
Nets fans."
--
www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/faculty/faculty_profile.jsp?faculty=593

This book explores the reception experiences of post-1958 Afro-Cubans in
South Florida in relation to their similarly situated “white” Cuban
compatriots. Utilizing interviews, ethnographic observations, and applying
Census data analyses, Aja begins not with the more socially diverse 1980
Mariel boatlift, but earlier, documenting that a small number of
middle-class Afro-Cuban exiles defied predominant settlement patterns in
the 1960 and 70s, attempting to immerse themselves in the newly formed but
ultimately racially exclusive “ethnic enclave.” Confronting a local Miami
Cuban “white wall” and anti-black Southern racism subsumed within an
intra-group “success” myth that equally holds Cubans and other Latin
Americans hail from “racial democracies,” black Cubans immigrants and
their children, including subsequent waves of arrival and return-migrants,
found themselves negotiating the boundaries of being both “black” and
“Latino” in the United States.

The book garnered this mention in a review of the film "Moonlight":

"Returning to Juan’s comment about the invisibility of black Cubans in
Miami, there is evidence that the Cuban-American population in Miami is
disproportionately whiter than Cuban-American populations in other
metropolitan areas of the U.S, as cited by Alan A. Aja in his book
Miami’s Forgotten Cubans. In other words, black and even
mixed-race Cubans tend to settle in other U.S. cities, perhaps in part
because they anticipate facing racism from their white compatriots in
Miami." --
How Oscar Favorite ‘Moonlight’ Subtly Illuminates the Erasure of Miami’s Black
Cubans 1/6/2017 Remezcla

Click here for pricing & to order ==>
www.palgrave.com/de/book/9781137575234
Note: this book is currently at $100 as the publisher attempts to recoup
costs from academia. It should come down to what mere mortals can
afford, especially if we remind the publishers.

Table of contents
(7 chapters)

Introduction: If Elián Were Black?
Pages 1-26

“It’s Like Cubans Could Only Be White,” Divided Arrival: Origins of a
Racially Bifurcated Migration
Pages 27-60

How Immigrants Became Criminals 3/17/2017 Boston Review: "According to ICE,
“criminal removals” comprised 92 percent of all deportations from the nation’s
interior last year, compared with only 3 percent in 1980. Yet immigrants are not
committing more crime than in the past. Rather the definition of “criminal” has
broadened significantly since the 1990s, when the federal government began
criminally prosecuting immigration infractions that were previously enforced as
civil matters, while also deporting an unprecedented number of immigrants with
minor criminal records."

Juan Flores (1943-2014): A Remembrance of a Great Scholar 12/17/2014 Racism
Review: "I (read: we) needed to dig deeper into Cuban anthropologist Fernando
Ortiz’s view of Cubanidad, which Juan had us critique in the seminar, as an
expression of “color-blind” nationalism that seemed to involve everyone but
Afro-Cubans. We needed to understand how the “Latin@ propensity to uphold
mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture),” as he and fellow collaborator and life
partner Miriam Jiménez Román wrote in the Afro-Latin@ Reader, was indeed an
“exceptionalist and wishful panacea,” deeply embedded in the contours of
anti-blackness."